At Least Make Storytelling More Representative

April 15, 2010

Ryan Hahn writes for the World Bank PSD blog on What would a better PR campaign for microfinance look like?:

My modest suggestion is that MFIs need to do a better job at storytelling. In his post, Roodman is quite critical of the MFIs’ reliance on a selective set of success stories. Indeed, the statement devotes nearly a full page to six success stories, all of individuals who took out microloans and successfully invested the money in starting or expanding microenterprises. Roodman is correct that these stories are simply anecdotes that never amount to hard evidence. But I seriously doubt the public-at-large will ever be able to appreciate the debates around the merits and pitfalls of randomized control trials. Thus, MFIs are obliged to fall back on storytelling, at least in their dealings with the general public.

But instead of rehashing the same stories (all but one of the six stories in the MFIs’ statement were about women, and all were about microentrepreneurs), MFIs should tell more stories that are consistent with the wide variety of microfinance initiatives. Surely, there must be more compelling stories about men investing in businesses and sending their kids to school. And it is easy to imagine the beaming faces of individuals who have used microsavings products and saved up for a big purchase like a motorbike. Or farmers who took out microinsurance and benefitted when a streak of bad weather came along. Even consumption smoothing could be a compelling story if a microloan helped someone get through the hungry season. Of course, all of these stories would still not make it over Roodman’s quantitative stick, but it just might help make the dialogue a little more honest in the future.

I think this is a nice point. I believe in storytelling. I have found it extremely effective to tell stories when I present my work (see the beginning of chapter 6). For what it is worth, I tell stories not about clients but about my journeys into knowledge, in order to bring the audience along with me.

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1. Alex Counts Says:
   April 15th, 2010 at 10:53 pm

   I think the story-telling you seek is out there, if you look for it. Try my book “Small Loans, Big Dreams” where there are many true stories told in depth that defy the classic microfinance journey as told by simplistic promoters. Same goes for Helen Todd’s book, and the early work “Jorimon of Beltoil Village and Others: Faces of Poverty” which had life histories of early Grameen borrowers written by trainees (doing this ‘research’ is part of their training process) and some of the stories end with the clients no better off than before they got involved with Grameen.

2. Milford Bateman Says:
   April 16th, 2010 at 2:45 am

   Isn’t this all getting really silly? I mean, story-telling is very useful if it used to illuminate an empirically verifiable wider truth – something works, and here in our stories is HOW and WHY it works. But that is not what is going on here at all. After 30 years of experience it is accepted even by microfinance advocates that we still don’t have the concrete evidence to show that microfinance ‘works’. Some even think the evidence shows that microfinance doesn’t work and is ultimately of great damage to the poor. But rather than think again, microfinance supporters now want to get around the mass of awkward facts, and keep the microfinance ball in the air a little longer, by regaling us with lots of uplifting stories instead. Such stories prove very little about the wider viability and efficiency of microfinance as poverty reduction policy, any more than did documenting lots of individuals benefiting from central planning in Russia in the 1980s ‘prove’ that central planning actually ‘worked’. What next? Collecting the life-stories of a few lucky winners in a casino in order to justify a poverty reduction policy composed of regular organized trips to Las Vegas and Atlantic City? Seems to me that the microfinance industry is getting really desperate in trying to try to prop up a ‘big idea’ that most experience, if not theory too, now seems to confirm simply did not work.

3. Alex Counts Says:
   April 16th, 2010 at 6:54 am

   Milford, you are nothing if not consistent in your views! I suggest you be more cautious in what you claim is “accepted by microfinance advocates” since that is a large group.